YOU season 3 premiere: Why did Natalie have to die? EP explains

The entirety of YOU season 3 launched on Netflix earlier today, and it only took a single episode for the show to surprise us.

Early on in the story, we were introduced to Michaela McManus in the role of Natalie, a real-estate agent who was clearly the next target of Joe Goldberg’s affections. It seemed like we were going down the same path as the first two seasons, only for Love to recognize what was happening and then kill Natalie in the closing seconds. This sets a lot of other things in motion, including some that could take weeks in order to properly unravel.

New YOU video! Take a look at our full thoughts on the season 3 premiere below. We’ll be discussing the show every day until the finale, so we suggest that you SUBSCRIBE to Matt & Jess on YouTube so you don’t miss any other updates.

So why make this move so early, especially when you could’ve milked Natalie’s storyline a little longer? As showrunner Sera Gamble tells TVLine in a new interview, there was a deliberate feeling behind the scenes that the show needed to keep audiences on their toes:

“You do have to keep switching things up … I’m going to say this, and Future Me is going to be really pissed that I said this out loud: With a show like this, where Season 1 was such a particular fun, twisty ride coming off of Caroline [Kepnes’] book, we really had to prove to you at the beginning of Season 2 that we would still be able to surprise you. So we did a lot of stuff in Season 2 to try to do that. The conversation at the beginning of Season 3 was ‘What do you think would happen if you were a viewer?’ And it’s that Michaela would be in the whole season, so we were like, ‘She’s got to go in Episode 1.’”

So how can Love and Joe contend with Natalie’s death? Well, that’s something we’ll have a chance to discuss for some time moving forward.

Related – Be sure to get some more news when it comes to YOU, including when season 4 could premiere

Do you think it was the right move in kill Natalie during the YOU season 3 premiere?

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